George RR Martin hopes Guillermo Del Toro adapts his underrated fantasy novel

By adapting “Frankenstein,” filmmaker Guillermo del Toro caught his white whale. He now said “Frankenstein” is the cornerstone to his “blessed business driven by love upon love upon love for monsters,” and now he’s ready to try something new. But there is at least one person who would like to bring Del Toro back to the world of horror and monsters: George RR Martin, author of “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

Although Martin will be best remembered for his stories set in Westeros, he had a long career as a writer before “A Game of Thrones” hit bookstore shelves in 1996. exclusive interview with Collider in 2025, Martin said “perhaps his favorite child” is his second solo novel, 1982’s “Fevre Dream.” Set in 1857, the book follows a steamship named Abner Marsh. While traveling the Mississippi River on his boat, the Fever dreamMarsh discovers that his business partner Joshua York and several passengers are vampires.

Martin, who wants to write the potential “Fevre Dream” film himself, told Collider that he has met with a few filmmakers about adapting the book. One of them is Guillermo del Toro. In a 2024 interview with Winter Is Coming dot net (a pop culture site inspired by “Game of Thrones”), Martin said:

“[Del Toro] love [‘Fevre Dream’]he says he wants to do it…but he doesn’t want to do it right now. He always has this project first and that project first, then this other project. But eventually he’ll make ‘Fevre Dream,’ if he lives that long and I live that long and the films live that long.”

Indeed, Del Toro’s list of unrealized projects is longSince a film “At The Mountains of Madness” by HP Lovecraft to a live action series of the horror thriller manga “Monster” by Naoki Urasawa.

Martin doesn’t just have a director in mind for “Fevre Dream.” His choice to play Abner Marsh is Ron Perlman, who has been part of Del Toro’s regular acting troupe since his first vampire film, “Cronos”.

Perlman also has experience with Martin; the actor starred in the 1987 television series “Beauty and the Beast,” of which Martin wrote several episodes. Perlman was the Beast, or lion-faced Vincent, opposite Linda Hamilton as Catherine, Beauty. Before the TV series “Game of Thrones”, Martin also said Perlman was his choice to play the scarred knight Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, another bestial character. (However, The Hound was ultimately played by Rory McCann.) One also wonders whether Perlman’s long blond mane as Vincent was on Martin’s mind when he conceived the Lannister family with golden hair and a lion theme.

In “Fevre Dream,” Marsh is portrayed as a huge man and Perlman always looks imposing on screen. The steamboat captain is uneducated but not slow; he starts reading Joshua’s poetry books and actually discovers that his friend is a vampire because York lets it slip that he met the long-dead Lord Byron. Abner has a simple dream: to run the fastest steamboat in Mississippi, and he is determined to defend it. Perlman is excellent, and often frightening, at playing characters prone to anger.

Another player that connects Martin and del Toro is Charles Dance, recently appeared in “Frankenstein” and stole the show as the cold-hearted Tywin Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” Dancing might seem like a natural fit for evil vampire “bloodbender” Damon Julian, but I’d say he could go against the grain as the white-haired Joshua York, stern and mysterious but ultimately benevolent.

“Fevre Dream” has little in common with “Game of Thrones,” but Martin fans should read it. You can see his literary flourishes taking root, like his gift for writing dialogue and his construction of ornate scenes (especially when describing parties). Fans of vampire books would also be deprived of not reading “Fevre Dream.” The most common argument for “Fevre Dream” is that Bram Stoker (author of “Dracula”) meets Mark Twain, particularly in Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on the Mississippi River. This mix echoes Anne Rice’s “Interview with the Vampire,” which, like “Fevre Dream,” throws leeches into Southern Gothic.

Given the setting, “Fevre Dream” inevitably explores slavery; Julian is introduced by feeding on the blood of slaves. The vampires in “Fevre Dream” call humans “cattle,” echoing the way slavery dehumanized black people. York, who wants to free his people from the “red thirst,” is scorned by Julian in the same way that slaveholders would white abolitionists. When York goes into the sun, Julian jokes that he wants his skin to become “brown and leathery.”

Another easy comparison is Ryan Coogler’s recent vampire film, “Sinners,” set in Jim Crow, Mississippi. This film uses vampires not to depict the racial hierarchies of the American South as “Fevre Dream” does, but as an allegory for cultural assimilation. Why else depicting head vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) as an Irishman living in America?

“Fevre Dream” was adapted into a comedy miniseries, scripted by Marin’s protégé Daniel Abraham, but no further adaptations were made. (“All we need is $100 million,” Martin told Winter Is Coming). Alas, like Martin’s “A Dream of Spring” – the still unpublished conclusion of “A Song of Ice and Fire” — a film “Fevre Dream” could indeed remain only a dream.